


If You Want To

by XtaticPearl



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Depression, Drabble, Implied Minor Steve Rogers/Sam Wilson - Freeform, M/M, POV Steve, Past Character Death, Steve Rogers Feels, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 07:03:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12249366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XtaticPearl/pseuds/XtaticPearl
Summary: Steve is not always lost or always depressed. But he is both in large measures. For a man who wants everything and nothing, what exactly is the right thing to do?





	If You Want To

**Author's Note:**

> This is a STEVE centric fic told from STEVE'S POV and if you're still willing to read it, have fun. The main characters are only those mentioned in the character tags. Also, implied means implied and not explicit. Have fun.

They’re somewhere in Denmark, in a city blurred into the last one, when Steve picks up a bottle of water from a vending machine and thinks about tombstones.

There’s one for Gabe in Massachusetts, in a family backyard because Gabe had faded with the colour of his uniform. His son had offered Steve a beer as they stood over the marked spot and had swallowed a pint with words, meeting Steve’s brow but never eyes. Dad, he called Gabe, and Steve could hear years in the pause that followed. It was a crude job, a rough stone with a name and a chronology with no message. No last words.

It was a dead stone and Steve had pulled out his new SHIELD issued phone to check out where his own tombstone was.

Turned out, he didn’t have one.

They’re somewhere in Denmark, looking for a dead Bucky and alive Winter Soldier, when Steve thinks about his own death and wonders why they never buried him. Why they let him linger.

The sounds of a memorial, an exhibition, linger in his ears and he drains the water till there’s nothing left.

When they pause running, Sam makes stew during Sundays and Steve buys groceries if he ever peels out of the uniform. Paying someone while wearing the suit makes him clench up for some reason. Sam stirs his pot with a silence that seems like he knows what the reason is.

They don’t talk about it. Not even on those days when Steve’s staring too long at the white and Sam’s eyeing a wallet photograph too often. They make-out twice; in a church and a library. They almost go further once in those two times but then Steve hears someone who sounds like a past. Sam pats his shoulder and nods before meeting him in a car.

They remain friends and Sam smiles at him on Sundays. He also starts dating a cop. Steve eats stew that’s somehow red and doesn’t think about why his past sounded like a bleeding German scientist. He’s got enough red to focus on.

The world doesn’t have just one German scientist to torment him apparently.

This time they’re out on a floating city and Tony decides the future of half the population. Steve stands near Natasha and his mind flashes to a SHIELD bunker.

 _I didn’t tell him_ , he thinks and waits for death, _I didn’t tell him and we’ll still die._

They don’t die but their world almost does. Not literal, but Steve has stopped being literal ever since he’s had to say he’s fine in this century. Tony’s Vision, Ultron’s Vision, a combination of a misguided hero and a mistaken saviour, saves the day. He doesn’t call Tony _sir_ and Steve ignores the way Tony always seems to wait for it.

Like he’s waiting for a past to come back.

Steve doesn’t say _me too._ He knows he’s wrong. He doesn’t know what’s right anymore.

 _I can’t tell him_ , he thinks as he watches Tony go, racing away in a car slower than him. _I can’t add another past that’ll never be rectified to his ledger._

It sounds fake to his ears but his hands shiver when he thinks otherwise and Steve goes along with the fake. He’s done that for a couple of years to know it enough now.

Steve is watching Rhodey train with Wanda when he thinks about the difference between a legend and a foreshadowing. His eyes track Rhodey’s arm as he fires and charges, ducks and weaves with the precision of experience. The armour is heavy but the man is light. The armour sports a machine gun, like the famed battlecry. The man sticks kill marks of Ultron stickers on his suit. Steve watches Rhodey and thinks about how he would become a legend with or without the team.

Wanda blocks a firing and Steve remembers the Ultron she had helped create. She is defensive in attack and fraying thin in control and her feet advance even as she retreats in plan. He sees red streaming from her hands and knows that she is a foreshadowing for or against the Avengers.

He watches her push Rhodey off and then get subdued by his tech, and doesn’t think about what teams mean with two threats.

 _I won’t tell him_ , he thinks as he gets in between Wanda and Rhodey to make a new routine of a shield and a fire. _I won’t be his counter threat or make him one._

Wanda throws him into a wall and he bleeds despite knowing it would happen before.

Tony looks at Steve and talks to Natasha after they killed 11 innocent people in Lagos. Wanda is outside, away from Tony and this team. The team that started it all. The soldier, the spy, and the soldering joint. They tell her it’s her choice but they’re all liars with honest intentions and Steve knows that she has choices she won’t be able to compensate for. Tony looks at him and Steve thinks he’s angry. Tony talks to Natasha and Steve thinks he’s afraid.

It takes him too long to realize that he had it all wrong.

 _I don’t know how to tell him_ , he thinks as he hugs Natasha in an empty church. They’re both liars and both ghosts of some past. They’re both betrayals to someone and they’re both clinging to something that’s slipping. _I don’t know how to tell him without ending everything I know._

They’re in a bunker in Siberia and Steve is lying again when he thinks of ice and metal. How they’re never a match. How one will melt and the other will rust. He’s lying to the man who was his friend and Steve watches the friendship die in Tony’s eyes.

He wonders if it will ever have a tombstone.

They leave the bunker, a broken man and a bent relic, and Steve leaves his lies with Tony on the ground.

He wonders if his shield was tombstone enough.

 _I should have told him_ , he thinks as he visits a dead friend’s tombstone again, and this time there are words. There’s white marble and clean cuts and no sons offering bitter beer. There’s two names and a past, and Steve stares at them with an appearance that is not him. _I should have told your son your truth. I should have told him my truth._

There are words on the tombstone and Steve reads them with blurry eyes.

“ _You always can, if you want to_.”


End file.
